New York Times Announces Plans to Disband Sports Department

The New York Times announced Monday that the publication will disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and events from The Athletic online and in print. The Times bought The Athletic in January 2022 for $550 million. 

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics and society at large,” Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, wrote in an email to their newsroom Monday morning. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

There will be no layoffs at this time, and journalists on the sports desk will be moved to other areas of the newsroom. A group on the business desk will cover money and power in sports, while new beats covering sports will be added to other sections. The transition is expected to be completed by the fall. There are approximately 35 writers and editors on the sports desk. 

The Athletic is run separately from The Times’s newsroom, but now its content will appear in print for the first time since the acquisition, according to the publication. Since the purchase, The Athletic has struggled to make a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year despite its number of paid subscribers growing by more than three million. 

In June, The Athletic laid off nearly 20 reporters and moved more than 20 others to new positions. Its leaders said the outlet would no longer assign at least one beat reporter to each sports team.